Notebook HDD load cycle count

[Darvon]

Hi!

I have LMDE 64 bit on my Thinkpad L520. GSmartControl says, my HDD is a Seagate Momentus 7200.4. I hear some quiet, but noticable clicking every 10-20 seconds or so from my HDD, and I remembered, that there was a problem with that in Ubuntu some years ago. So I've installed smartctl. I went to a terminal:

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smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep -E "(Load_Cycle_Count|ID)"
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2289

(I found this command on an ubuntu wiki-page)

About one and a half hours later, the same command shows:

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ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2385

So there are about 100 accesses in 90 minutes. I guess that's too much. My question is, will my drive brake after a few months, if I let this happen all the time? What can I do? Can I use the solutions for Ubuntu on LMDE? I've also found one for squeeze, http://easytofu.com/23062011215944-debi ... cle-counts , but it warns to step back if someone doesn't know what all that means what they advice - and I don't really know.

[Darvon]

I've had Mint 12 installed before LMDE, and there I didn't notice the noise from the HDD, and since I've used my notebook for months now, the actual cycle count would be higher, if this bug happened back then. Any ideas why?

[Darvon]

How did Mint 12 handle this?

[darethehair]

In the past few months when I became aware (and started to panic) over 'load_cycle_count' on my Western Digital 'green' hard drives in my Linux boxes, I ultimately found and used a very simple utility, which I assume made a difference to the rate of that statistic. For example:

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sudo idle3ctl -s255 /dev/sda

I am not the best one to explain the cautions and risks involved, but over time I ended up seeing pages like this:

http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

Before stumbling across this easy Linux utility, the best advise I was finding was to go through the hassle of creating a bootable CD containing a Windows 'wdidle3.exe' utility, which a lot of people had successfully used. It took a bit of trust on my part to use the Linux 'idle3ctl' instead, but I have had no problems -- and was much easier to use!

Is this what you were looking for?

EDIT: Sorry, I think these utilities are JUST for Western Digital drives. I did not know that this problem existed on any other brand.